


Standing Tall On Your Horizon

by saintsrow2



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: M/M, Multi, Post-Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 04:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14866395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsrow2/pseuds/saintsrow2
Summary: For once, he didn’t. There was something more important, and the nightmares were symptomatic, not the real problem.“We have to go to the Capital Wasteland,” MacCready said.“Right now?” Atticus said. He had that lilt in his voice that suggested he was trying to joke. “It’s a little dark out.”“We have to get Duncan.”Atticus shut up real fast.After the dust has settled and the Institute is gone, RJ MacCready and Sole Survivor Atticus travel back to the Capital Wasteland to retrieve Duncan and finally start the rest of their lives. A slow, quiet fic about putting the past to rest and accepting the uncertain.





	Standing Tall On Your Horizon

**Author's Note:**

> After having so many Fallout OCs for so many years, it feels kind of wild to actually post something they appear in. I chose to write this solely from MacCready's perspective because I always find Atticus a more interesting person to write about than write from. The explanation for why is too boring to bother with. It was a delight to actually write about a certain Lone Wanderer, though. How I do adore him.

The last of the Brotherhood of Steel left the Commonwealth over six months after the destruction of the Institute. Proctor Tuesday Blues, wearing a suit of power armor instead of the red Proctor robes MacCready was used to seeing him in, had finished preparations to lead the Brotherhood squires and remaining paladins out of the Commonwealth and to another branch of the Brotherhood in the Mojave.

“I started off in the Mojave,” Tuesday told Atticus and MacCready when he dropped by their home in Sanctuary to say goodbye. “It’ll be good to be back. Honestly, looking at everything that’s happened since I changed to the East Coast Brotherhood, I don’t think I ever should have left.”

MacCready thought he would miss Tuesday. He had no fondness for the Brotherhood, but for a supposed Protector, Tuesday didn’t seem to either. He had a level of certainty to his ways that MacCready found reassuring; a confidence that he was doing the right thing that made it easy to fall in line with his plans.

MacCready and Atticus were sitting on the deck outside their house while Tuesday stood in their front yard next to the flowerbed, as casually as was possible when you were wearing a giant suit of armour that didn’t let you sit down. The giant steel suit contrasted against Atticus’ carefully maintained flowers in a way MacCready thought was exemplary of the Commonwealth. Tuesday was watching the sky as he talked, eyes shaded by his large sunglasses, faintly smiling the whole time. It was going to be sad when he left. MacCready had no faith they’d run into each other again, and that idea disappointed him.

“Why did you leave?” Atticus asked. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, holding a nuka cola in his hand, shirt sleeves rolled up. It was the most at-ease MacCready had seen him in a while, as though he wasn’t already planning the next time he’d have to take a long trip from home to go and fix a laundry list of everyone else’s problems.

“I don’t really know,” Tuesday said. He thought for a minute. “That’s a lie. I was running away. Lot of people back home started relying on me, and I guess I missed when I could just spend my time hammering together bits of metal and trying to make something useful.”

It was a sentiment that MacCready could understand. Around them, life in Sanctuary was always busy. The town had flourished, thriving and alive with homes and farms, traders from the other towns and Diamond City regularly passing through. Atticus and the Minutemen had torn down as much of the old town as they could to make room for the new; replacing the empty, crumbling shells of the pre-war houses with new solid, safe homes for families to live in. Their own house was built on the foundation of what had been Atticus’ home in the Old World, now a smaller building, a new house for a new family; Atticus, MacCready and Shaun.  

Shaun. The kid was out of the house, running around after Sturges, helping him with his daily handyman tasks. MacCready could see him in the yard of a home across the way, standing next to Sturges with a hammer slung over his shoulder. Shaun. He had curly, wavy blond hair – Atticus said he’d had blond hair as a kid too, bright blond, only darkening to brown as he got older – and his father’s broad features and gently sad, downward sloping eyes. But the eyes themselves were deep brown, the eyes of a woman MacCready had never met, who had died a long time ago.

Shaun’s laughter rang across the street as Sturges said something funny. He had such a gift for mechanics, just like his father. Just like his Father.

MacCready loved Shaun. He had loved him the second Atticus had brought him home from the Institute, clutching the small boy in his arms like he was a precious doll. That had been the first time MacCready had ever seen Atticus cry, holding his son to his chest and weeping, while Shaun wrapped his arms around his dad’s neck and told him not to cry in the way only a child could. Shaun had become MacCready’s son immediately. There had been no questioning it; he was Atticus’ partner, Atticus had a child, they were going to raise this child together. MacCready loved his son.

MacCready loved _both_ his sons.

“It’ll be good to be back home,” Tuesday said, bringing MacCready back to Earth. He was looking at MacCready with an unseen eye, and for a moment, MacCready could believe Tuesday knew what he was thinking. “I missed the desert. I know there’s all this clean water here, and fresh air, and fish, but sometimes you just miss waking up in the morning with ten tonnes of sand in your ass crack.”

Atticus laughed. He stood up, to shake Tuesday’s hand one last time.

“It’s a hell of a long journey,” he said. “You better stay safe. Not enough good people in the Wastes to be losing you.”

“I have my ways,” Tuesday said. “I might write you, if I ever need help, y’know… Killing another evil despot, or something. Always good to have help.”

MacCready stood to shake Tuesday’s hand too. The power armor had a strong grip that made the bones in MacCready’s hand rattle. He was privately glad Atticus never touched power armor. Tuesday shoved a packet of smokes down the front of MacCready’s shirt.

“You’re always begging,” Tuesday said. “Thought you might shut up for a minute now.”

“You’re funny,” MacCready said. “Hope you don’t get eaten by super mutants.”

“You too, my friend. Don’t let the suits grind you down.” He clapped MacCready on the shoulder hard enough to shake the smaller man’s entire body. “I have to get back to the rest of the Brotherhood. We need to get moving. Hope they haven’t left without me!”

Tuesday left then, putting his helmet on and marching out of Sanctuary Hills with so little ceremony it was like he was only leaving for the day. MacCready made more fuss when he was leaving to walk the day-long trek to Diamond City. Atticus draped an arm around MacCready’s shoulders, the two of them watching as the last of Maxson’s army left them behind with nothing to remember them by but the wreck of a blimp at the airport.

“It’s over a month’s walk to the Mojave Desert,” Atticus said. “He’s crazy.”

“It’s his home,” MacCready said.

Atticus thought about it, shading his eyes from the sun with his hand. MacCready could see he was watching Shaun now as the kid knelt on the grass next to Sturges, tightening a bolt with a spanner as big as his whole forearm.

“I think I understand that,” Atticus said.

 

* * *

 

Atticus and MacCready both regularly had nightmares. Atticus didn’t like to talk about his, processing dreams in grim-faced silence in the mornings. MacCready had grown used to sharing his; while Atticus hated talking, he was an endlessly capable listener. That night it was MacCready who jerked awake, heart racing. His sudden movements woke up Atticus too – he was the lightest sleeper MacCready had ever met.

“What’s going on?” Atticus said, voice clear as a bell in the darkness. “RJ?”

“I just had a dream,” MacCready said. He sighed and sunk back against the bed, leaning his body heavily against Atticus’. Atticus was broad-shouldered and determinedly chubby, and MacCready had grown fond of pillowing his own scrawny body against him.

“You wanna talk about it?”

For once, he didn’t. There was something more important, and the nightmares were symptomatic, not the real problem.

“We have to go to the Capital Wasteland,” MacCready said.

“Right now?” Atticus said. He had that lilt in his voice that suggested he was trying to joke. “It’s a little dark out.”

“We have to get Duncan.”

Atticus shut up real fast. In the night, the two of them had light only through the moon that barely penetrated the clouds, shining in through the window. It was shadowy in their room, the moonlight shining on Atticus’ eyes, white on the harsh edges of the huge scars that run across his cheeks.

Atticus’ hair and skin were nearly the exact same shade of sepia brown. MacCready had always thought this was beautiful; he looked as though he had been pulled right out of an old, time-aged photograph and into the world. But then his eyes were that watery white-blue, a colour that almost looked sickly, and sometimes his eyesight wasn’t at its best. MacCready didn’t know if Atticus could see him right now in the low moonlight, see the look of pained concern on his face. He didn’t want this to be a joke.

“How far is it to the Capital?” Atticus said.

“Two weeks,” MacCready said. “It’ll take us a month to get there and back.”

Atticus was silent. He was staring somewhere into the distance, eyes fixed on nothing at all.

“I’ll radio the Minutemen and the Railroad in the morning,” he said. “Sturges can keep Sanctuary running. I’ll have Deacon and Preston keep an eye on things while we’re gone. Shaun can stay with Piper and Nick in Diamond City for a while. He’ll enjoy that. The two of us and Dogmeat can just go by ourselves.”

“I thought you were going to say we should sent a caravan,” MacCready said. He was finding it hard to express the feeling of relief settling over him in that moment.

“I’m sure Duncan will want to see his dad again,” Atticus said. “And I want to meet him as soon as I can.”

MacCready pulled Atticus’ face down to his and kissed him deeply.

 

* * *

  

“I don’t want to stay with Nick or Piper,” Shaun said. “I want to go with you.”

Shaun was sitting at the table, holding tight onto a spoon while the porridge Atticus had made for breakfast cooled rapidly. His face was grim, a surprising amount of determined ferocity for someone so young. Atticus was sitting across from him, quietly eating, while MacCready knelt on the floor next to Shaun, eye-level with the boy. Even though it was MacCready who was speaking, it was Atticus that Shaun’s eyes were fixed on. Atticus was looking at his food.

“Shaun, you’ll have fun with Piper and Nick,” MacCready said, a note of desperation in his voice. “You get to be detective for a whole month.”

“I want to go with you,” Shaun said again. He was holding onto the spoon so tightly it looked like it was going to snap in half.

“It’s not safe,” Atticus said.

“You’ll be there! You’ll protect me,” Shaun said, pleadingly.

MacCready thought Shaun had become used to him and Atticus being around. It had been normal – was normal – for Atticus to be on long journeys doing work for the Railroad and the Minutemen, travelling without seeing Shaun for days, weeks at a time, then only staying at home for a few days. And in all that work, there was always the risk Atticus wouldn’t come back, wouldn’t make it home to Shaun at all. But Atticus had been in Sanctuary for some weeks now; his presence in Sanctuary had become the new normal.

Shaun had asked MacCready about why Atticus went away so often a few months ago.

“He has to do a lot of important work for the Minutemen and the Railroad,” MacCready had said.

“Lots of people are in the Minutemen,” Shaun had said. “Why does it always have to be him?”

“He’s an important man.”

“He’s important to me, too.”

MacCready hadn’t known what to tell him then and wouldn’t be able to explain it now. It didn’t make sense, really, that Atticus would be the one who had to fix everything in the Commonwealth, constantly trying to make up for the damage a man he never knew had done. Atticus had told him, many a time, why he did what he did, but MacCready thought on some level he would never understand it. He knew what guilt felt like, but he didn’t really know what it was like to hold yourself accountable.

Now, in their kitchen, made of wood and steel that MacCready himself had helped lay down, Shaun was choked up with a furious betrayal you only saw in people who still had a kind of naïve belief in the world. He was such an intelligent, resolute child, that it was unusual to see him this upset. But he was still a _child_. MacCready felt like he was out of touch with what a child was supposed to be.

“You’ve never gone further than here to Diamond City,” Atticus said. “This is much more dangerous territory, and it’s a lot longer.”

Shaun looked at MacCready. “Please, Dad.”

The physical act of looking from Shaun back to Atticus made MacCready feel like he was tearing glue off his skin. There was an internal battle between the part of him that wanted to side with Atticus and agree that it was too dangerous for Shaun, and the part of him that wanted to make Shaun happy. Atticus looked at him and knew, before MacCready even had a chance to open his mouth, what he was going to say.

“If we took the main caravan trails…” MacCready said. “A lot of people travel that route. We’ll be in good company.”

“You’re not serious,” Atticus said.

“I just think it wouldn’t really be that much more dangerous _than_ going to Diamond City.”

Shaun’s face was alight with hope now, looking between MacCready and Atticus with wide, eager eyes.

“It’s a huge risk,” Atticus said.

“Everything’s a risk, Attics,” MacCready said. Tactical deployment of the nickname. Atticus pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger and sighed.

“If one single thing goes wrong,” he said, “I am taking you right back home with me on the first caravan I find.”

It was an empty threat. Atticus would never drop MacCready off on his own like that. It was just a threat to try and keep Shaun in line, not that they were likely to have much trouble with him. He was a good kid. A good kid who was beaming with excitement now he’d gotten what he wanted.

 

* * *

 

Atticus called out to his many friends over the radio, let them know he would be away for a while, for a few weeks. Most expressed some concern about Atticus and MacCready setting out alone; Preston suggested taking some Minutemen with them, but Atticus wouldn’t hear of it. Deacon made it clear that Railroad spies would have their backs the whole time, lest anything go wrong. The constantly available support would never stop being novel to MacCready.

They set out under a grey sky that Mama Murphy told them was certain to clear later on. They took Dogmeat, the shepherd bounding gleefully along after them when Atticus called, always on patrol. Between the three of them, they carried enough supplies for the journey, provided they did some hunting on the way. They would have to restock when they got to the Capital. MacCready thought hunting would be a good opportunity to give Shaun some life skills outside of just fixing up his dads’ guns. In all, their spirits were high that morning.

It was a long way south to the Capital, but they wanted to avoid the Glowing Sea, and headed east out of Boston. Two days to reach Connecticut, two to make it through Connecticut to Pennsylvania, another four or five to get through Pennsylvania, and a final three to cover the last stretch to Washington DC, MacCready estimated. That was on foot; it would be faster if they hitched a ride on the caravans when they could.

The first couple of days passed without incident; it didn’t occur to MacCready until they were leaving the Commonwealth behind that this was more of the Wasteland than Atticus had ever seen before. Atticus had travelled America extensively during his time in the army, but that had been two hundred years ago, and might as well have been another planet. The land here was boggy, the once vast highways crumbling and sinking into the water-logged ground, disappearing under swarms of mirelurks that they avoided as well they could. MacCready amused Shaun with his sharpshooting the second night, taking out a mirelurk from the roof of a building, hitting it in its vulnerable face. They roasted some of the meat and traded some of it to a passing traveller in exchange for a couple more bullets. It wasn’t a great trade, which MacCready normally would have grumbled about, but it meant more to Atticus to give people some food.

Shaun was full of questions, mostly about Duncan, about who he was and how he had come to be left alone.

“What’s like?” Shaun said. “Will he want to be friends? Will he help me with inventing?”

“He’s only three,” MacCready warned. Almost four, now. They’d be able to celebrate his fourth birthday together he realised, with a kind of wonder. “He’s shy, but I’m sure you’ll get on great. Maybe he won’t be much help with your inventing, though.”

“I can teach him,” Shaun said confidently.

Shaun’s other favourite topic to ask about was history; he pestered Atticus constantly for stories about the past but was met with nothing but sluggish dismissiveness. Atticus mostly seemed indifferent about the old world, neither expressing interest or anger, only really taking the time to explain the area they were passing through was a ‘state forest’ of some kind when they were crossing the border into Connecticut. It was always the same when you asked Atticus about the past; he avoided the subject not so much with grace as he did by outright ignoring what you asked. It was only Shaun’s childish pestering that could rouse him from his usual reticence, almost bullying him into speaking. MacCready told Shaun to quit it a couple of times, but it was always Atticus who would just raise a hand and say it was fine, fine for the boy to be curious. Rarely would he ever give an answer that Shaun found actually satisfying, though. The most common thing passed between the three of them the first through days was Shaun’s loud groan.

Atticus called the space between Connecticut and Pennsylvania ‘Newww Yahwk State’, said in a ridiculous put-on accent that made MacCready laugh and Shaun roll his eyes. They had to take a ferry across the river in the middle of the state, and it tacked another day onto their journey, but they made up some time by travelling with a caravan into Pennsylvania proper. On the ferry over, they watched the spires of huge buildings jutting out of the ocean, faint and skeletal against the bright morning sky. It took half an hour of needling for Atticus to say that it had been part of New York once, and that New York had been one of the biggest cities in America, if not the world.

“Now it’s just a big fish tank,” Atticus had said. This made him laugh, but then he lapsed into a stubborn silence that wasn’t shifted until MacCready came and sat by him, staring out over the slow waters of the river.

They sat side-by-side for a few moments, MacCready keeping his eyes low and his breathing steady to try and abate his growing sea-sickness, until he finally spoke up to Atticus.

“I didn’t say thank you.”

Atticus gave him a funny look. “What for?”

“Helping me get Duncan back?”

“You don’t need to thank me. Of course I was going to help you. What kind of monster would I be to say no?”

“I know but… Fu- You’ve done so much for me already.”

“He’s my son too, RJ. I want to meet him. I want our family.”

MacCready squeezed his eyes shut, maybe because of the motion sickness, maybe to try and hide the tears burning in his eyes.

“I want that too. I never thought… I’d get this chance. A second chance.”

“You deserve one,” Atticus said. “I don’t know if I do, but if I can use my second chance to make you and my kids happy then I’m not going to question it.”

MacCready leaned over to press his head into Atticus’ shoulder. They wound the fingers of their hands together, the cool metal bands of their wedding rings touching.

“I really never knew if I would get to be this happy again,” MacCready said.

“I’ve _never_ been this happy,” Atticus said. “I was never this happy in the old world.”

There was a pain in his words, a kind of melancholy threaded through what he was saying. His frosted blue eyes watched the water lapping around the islands that had not existed 200 years ago. Sometimes it could be hard to read his expression, his mouth always pulled into an almost-smile by the gnarled scars that ran up his cheeks from his lips, turning his face into something divided by war. Right now, he looked blank, face washed of any expression at all.

“I think I was always made to live in this world,” he said.

 

* * *

 

That night, four nights in, they set up camp on what would have been the state border, back in a time when people gave a shit about that kind of thing. There was a small trading post at the border, but they had no beds to spare inside, so they’d offered the three of them some shelter in an empty stable. Shaun slept curled up with Dogmeat on a bed of dry hay while a soft rain dripped from the edge of the roof. Atticus and MacCready wound themselves up in a single blanket and somehow stayed awake despite the tiredness of their bodies, just long enough to talk.

“Getting through Pennsylvania will take the longest,” Atticus said. “Railroad says there’s some crazy stuff going on further west, but as long as we stick to the coast, we should be ok.”

“It’s a shorter trip along the coast anyway,” MacCready said. “Depends how bad the flooding is around there, though. Might have to get a boat some of the way.”

“We can afford it. What’re our chances of reaching the Capital by boat?”

“Not good. Much better off going by road.” He didn’t want to go by boat anyways, didn’t like the way the rocking of the ocean made him nauseous. He’d spent most of the trip on the ferry with his head between his knees while Atticus rubbed his back.

Shaun shifted in his sleep, mumbling something in a dream and clutching at Dogmeat’s fur. MacCready watched him sleep with tired eyes.

“I hope he gets on with Duncan,” he said.

“He will. Shaun gets on with everyone,” Atticus said, a spark of pride in his voice.

“He’s a good kid, Attics.”

“I know, Mr Mayor.”

MacCready jabbed him in the ribs and Atticus laughed, low and soft.

“Is it crazy I’m scared that Duncan won’t like me?” Atticus said.

“No, I get it. He will, though. Who could hate you?”

“A lot of people, Mac.”

“That’s all political crap. He’s not even four yet. You’ll just be his big, fun, new dad who… Gives piggyback rides, and teaches him to swim.”

Atticus laughed again. Shaun shifted again in his sleep, always restless in his dreams. There was a hesitance on MacCready’s tongue when he spoke next, about something he normally wouldn’t talk about lightly if his senses weren’t dulled already with oncoming sleep.

“Do you think about how he’ll grow up?” MacCready said.

“Of course, all the time. He’s my kid.”

“I know… I know. But…”

Atticus went stiff against MacCready, his body rigid in a way that alarmed him.

“If you’re getting at what I _think_ you are…” Atticus said, voice cold.

“I just… Worry sometimes. About him.”

“There’s nothing to worry about. He’s a happy, healthy kid, with two dads who love him. Most kids here don’t have half that. He’s a _normal_ kid, RJ.”

In a lot of ways, he really was. Maybe more normal a kid than RJ had ever been; curious, naïve and filled with an unbridled optimism about the world. MacCready hoped Shaun stayed that way. But there was that threat, the overhanging rock of truth that could drop at any moment, disrupting the quiet life they’d built for themselves. Maybe Shaun wasn’t going to grow up normal. There was a figure overshadowing him that he didn’t even know existed, and that Atticus chose to pretend he didn’t know either. It was the kind of thing MacCready didn’t like to think about.

Atticus fell asleep and afterwards would not speak about it again.

 

* * *

 

They had a fight the next day.

Shaun had wanted to try MacCready’s sniper rifle, but the gun was far too heavy for the kid to even move, so MacCready had dug out the smallest 10mm handgun they had with them, set up a can on a stump, and told Shaun to go nuts. They were supposed to be hunting, but they hadn’t been having much in the way of luck, Atticus had taken Dogmeat further into the woods to try and search, but MacCready had already mentally resigned them all to a night of eating jerky. Not that that was exactly a trial; he’d lived through far worse than having to eat some dried meat. With a lack of anything better to do, it had been decided it was time for Shaun to learn a little bit of self-defence.

The first shot shocked Shaun, clearly, the boy somehow not anticipating how strong the recoil would be. He stumbled back after he’d fired the first bullet, mouth and eyes wide, staring at MacCready in a way that made him laugh.

“Don’t make fun of me!” Shaun had said in mock-anger while his father laughed.

“Don’t be so funny, then,” MacCready countered.

They both pulled faces at each other, before he helped Shaun line up a proper shot, gently steering him through the right way to hold a gun and to shoot. His hands on Shaun’s shoulders, he could feel the way the muscles tensed in his small body, the huge effort that it took to pull the trigger. He was an active kid, but not one who had ever had to do much hard labour; there were adults and willing, loyal dogs to do that kind of thing for him. He was only about eleven years old, after all.

They were distracted by someone crashing through the undergrowth and looked to see Atticus approaching with Dogmeat bounding at his heels. The look on Atticus’ face was thunderous, and he snatched the gun out of Shaun’s hands with a suddenness that took them all by surprise. Shaun was agape at this show of force from a person who had never so much as raised their voice at him, surprised and confused rather than scared in any sense. It was MacCready who was really shaken, looking up at Atticus’ angry face in bewilderment. For them to be actually _angry_ was strange; normally his darker moods manifested as underlying tension, a quiet bitterness that RJ had learned over the time he’d known them. This was just fury.

“What the hell are you doing?” Atticus said, voice sharp, but not loud.

“I wanted to learn how to shoot, Dad,” Shaun said.

“You didn’t think to even ask me about this?” Atticus said.

“I was just showing him how to hold a gun,” MacCready said. “We were messing around until you got back.”

“I don’t want him to know how to hold a gun!”

The statement took MacCready completely off-guard. He stared at Atticus with an expression that told of how ridiculous he thought that was to say, which didn’t help the sour mood much.

“How’s he going to look after himself if he can’t fight? How’s he going to hunt? I’m not saying he needs to be a child soldier like those Brotherhood drones…”

“Good, because he’s not going to be.”

“But he has to be able to fend for himself. Come on, Atticus.”

“No, he _doesn’t_. He has us to look after him. He’s a _child_. He doesn’t need to know how to _kill_.”

“When I was his age…”

“My son is not being raised the way you were.”

That hurt. Even if it was true, and even if it was for the best, it still hurt somehow. MacCready was already mayor by the time he was eleven. He was a crack shot who had killed by the time he was ten years old. He had first picked up a gun when he was eight, trained on how to shoot by a child younger than Shaun was now, who had later died of a disease none of them could understand how to treat. He would struggle to recall their name.

“Dad!” Shaun said, his voice plaintive. “But I want to be able to shoot. I want to help you!”

“You don’t need to help me,” Atticus said. “You’re not meant to be worrying about surviving. I don’t want you to shoot, or to help me. You’re a _kid_. I want you to be a kid.”

He wasn’t angry. He was sad. His voice was heavy with the idea of his son having to fight or struggle, his pale eyes seeing something beyond the woods they were standing in now, beyond the dark trees and dripping rain and the ever grey-tinged sky. The one similarity between MacCready and Atticus’ pasts was that they had both married at eighteen, both promised eternity to women they would later lose. Atticus had been shipped off by the army shortly after that, however, left his new wife behind to go fight in a war he would stop believing in. They’d both thought of themselves as grown adults at eighteen. Thought they were ready for anything. Shaun protested being called a child. He thought it was an insult.

“Even if that’s true, I’m not going to be a kid forever,” Shaun said. “What about afterwards?”

“I’m not having this discussion with you,” Atticus said, putting the gun away in his own pack. “I’m going back out there. Wait here.”

He left before anyone could protest; storming off into the thin and spindly trees, leaving even Dogmeat behind as he marched away to cool down on his own. When he came back, there would be no talking to him about this; he would return later when he was lonely, press his forehead to MacCready’s and whisper that he hated fighting, hated when they didn’t immediately, automatically agree. But there would be no arguing with him.

MacCready sat down heavily on the stump where they’d set up cans for Shaun to shoot, and Shaun sat beside him, resting his head on his father’s knee. MacCready tousled his hair, running fingers through the shiny curls.

If he was honest, MacCready did not ever think they would get to this moment when he first met Atticus. Atticus had stomped into the Third Rail with Piper on his tail, only for her to immediately abandon him to go and flirt with Magnolia. Atticus had appeared right after a couple of Gunners left, as though he’d scented someone in need like a bloodhound. He’d asked a few prying questions about who the Gunners were, and when MacCready had asked how he knew Atticus wouldn’t just stab him in the back, Atticus had smiled and said;

“You don’t. That’s part of the risk, right?” And the way he’d said it – with that cocky little half-smile he liked to pull when he was trying to be charming – put a shiver right down MacCready’s spine. He’d still charged 250 caps for the privilege of his company, though. Right then, it was just a business transaction. He was signing on to be a hired gun.

He hadn’t trusted Atticus for a long time; he didn’t trust any of those vault weirdos, not after that _other one_. But the mistrust hadn’t kept. Atticus was cynical, and funny, and listened with a tenderness that his close-lipped attitude didn’t allude to. His willingness to help _everybody_ had been annoying at first – MacCready felt there had to be a catch to it, a scam, a moment where Atticus turned around and did something to get his own. But that moment never came, and when MacCready was the one needing help, Atticus did so without question.

He gave Atticus a little wooden soldier, and Atticus gave him a gold ring. They gave each other a house, and a son, and garden to grow food. A place where MacCready could stop and feel the sunlight on his face every day.

“How did you grow up?” Shaun asked.

“Hm? Oh… Well…” MacCready tried to think of a good way to explain Little Lamplight. “I grew up in a settlement. But… There were no adults there. It was just kids. When you grew up, you had to leave, so it was all children trying to look after ourselves.”

“That sounds cool,” Shaun said.

“It wasn’t. It was pretty scary, honestly.”

Shaun seemed humbled by this response, the eager smile on his face slipping away, replaced by a more thoughtful expression.

“Why were you alone?”

“Adults left us there, or kids who were abandoned found it. My mom left me there because it’s where she grew up. She didn’t know how to be a mother.”

He hadn’t thought about his mother since Duncan had been born, and then that had been just a fleeting prayer, that he wouldn’t end up doing the same thing to his son. That his ignorance of what a family was would overrule his love for his child. He thought he almost understood her now, in a distant way.

“So, what did Dad mean, when he said he didn’t want me raised the same way as you? He didn’t want me to be alone?”

“Something like that.”

He didn’t know how to explain murder to a child. He hadn’t even been able to explain to Lucy that he was a paid killer.

Atticus came back twenty minutes later with something he called a rabbit, although he seemed unconvinced about that, and he cooked dinner for the three of them in contemplative silence. Occasionally he threw MacCready a doe-eyed look, soft and wordlessly apologetic. He didn’t come around about Shaun learning to shoot, though.

 

* * *

 

They rode with a caravan through the rest of Pennsylvania, taking the short trail along the coast for the next three days, seeing the places where the land had crumbled into the sea and islands had formed. Shaun stood on Atticus’ shoulders to wave at a boat passing by, the waters drowning a place Atticus said was once called New Jersey and was now just a crest of land barely peeking over the ocean. It was comfortable travelling with people, people who had a child of their own, who was immediately enamoured by Shaun’s bright intelligence and the way Atticus and MacCready were wrapped around his little finger. That child walked everywhere with a rifle on her back almost as big as she was, which they chose not to comment on. Atticus watched children like a hawk the whole journey though; MacCready knew he wasn’t going to allow an opportunity for Shaun to slink away with his new friend and take turns with her gun.

But it was nice being with the other adults, people who didn’t know them and were happy to have Atticus and MacCready on deck for a few caps and the promise of helping them unload the brahmin when they reached Philadelphia. One of the traders marvelled at how much Shaun looked like Atticus, how lovingly Atticus swung Shaun around, allowed the kids to clamber over him with enthusiastic play.

“You seem like a nice family. It’s always encouraging to see other people making it out here,” the trader said, and the words made MacCready surge with pride.

The closer they got to the Capital, the worst things got. You could watch as the ground beneath your feet grew sour, the plant life giving way to only those that were most hardy, most capable of surviving the bitter, radioactive lands. It rained less, but the sky was always dark with cloud, and the water was always unpleasantly, unnaturally warm. Trees grew in black, gnarled claws like the bones of old monsters. The traders warned them not to swim or bathe in the water; it would only make them sick.

“It’s just been getting worse,” one of them said, gravely. She was a woman twice MacCready’s age, skin on her face tanned and wind-beaten, eyes always hidden under thick, dirty goggles. She had a loud voice and disregard for manners that he’d warmed to immediately. “Last ten years or so, the Capital has only gotten worse. First all the water turned poison, then the Brotherhood started tearing the place apart on their damned crusade. Now it’s all run by the raiders. You’re damn fools for going into the place, you ask me.”

“It’s home,” MacCready said, not able to veil the bitterness in his voice.

They left the caravan in Philadelphia but spent the night in the biggest settlement they’d seen in some time. MacCready somehow still found it strange not having to scrimp and save every cap; Atticus was freer with money than he’d ever been, and saw no problem throwing money down to sleep in a rented room or buy hot food from an inn. He even splurged on a couple of beers, sitting at the bar, and ignoring requests for stories from other travellers who were interested in the scars on his face or the metal braces on his knees. MacCready made up bullshit instead to fill the silence, spinning stories about fights with giant deathclaws and robots that tried to steal bodies. It bought them a couple more drinks, and made Atticus laugh, and that was all that mattered.

They slept that night on a single bed in a hotel room, Dogmeat at the foot of the bed and Shaun wedged between his fathers’ bodies, always pushing an elbow into someone’s gut or shoving his cold feet against someone’s legs. Atticus wound his arms around his son and husband both, holding the three of them in a tight grip that even Shaun’s wriggling couldn’t free them from. It was maybe three more days until they’d reach the Capital, and MacCready didn’t know if he’d be sleeping much more until Duncan was in his arms. In the cool darkness of the room, he asked Atticus if he was still awake.

“Hm?” Atticus said, voice a whisper in the night, breath close enough to ruffle the hair on Shaun’s head.

“I can’t stop thinking about Duncan.”

He felt Atticus’ hand reaching out blindly until it managed to find his face, stroking gently on his cheek.

“He’s going to be so happy to see you,” Atticus said.

“It’s been over a year since I saw him. I wouldn’t blame him if he _did_ hate me.”

“Hey. You did what you had to do. If he doesn’t understand that now, he’ll understand it later. And you’ve got your whole life to make up for one year.”

Shaun rolled over again, shoved his head into the underside of MacCready’s chin, face pressed into his throat. There was a lingering guilt, but at the same time, he could let himself believe things were alright.

 

* * *

 

They were attacked by raiders a few hours outside of Philly. Maybe five men, all with guns and armour, sprung at them when they were crossing through a patch of empty, crumbling houses. It was the most action they’d seen in over a week; keeping to the main trails and to caravans had kept them out of the line of sight of roaming bandit gangs for the most part, but it was inevitable they’d run into some one day.

Shaun hid with Dogmeat far back while Atticus and MacCready took the attackers face-on. Atticus’ usual strat was to pick people off one by one, sweeping through an area while MacCready took point, cleaning up with a thoroughness born from years of military training. It was fast and efficient, counteracting the raiders’ show of force with speed and determination that left the fleeing enemies scrambling. Atticus let the ones that fled run; watched them vanish into the scraps of buildings left standing.

MacCready fetched Shaun from his hiding place expecting the boy to be scared; he always ran and hid the rare times raiders appeared outside Sanctuary, and MacCready was unsure of how much violence he’d really seen. But Shaun was calm, approaching Atticus with a determined look on his face.

“If I had a gun I could have helped,” was the first thing he said.

“We already talked about this,” Atticus said. “It’s not happening.”

“I want to be useful!” Shaun said.

“There’s better ways to help than shooting people.” Atticus stood, spread his arms to indicate the world around them, the destroyed homes, the wreckage on the horizon. “This is what happens when people with guns rule the world. The world is bad because of what people from the old world did, Shaun. We’re fixing it because of them.”

“People who can’t defend themselves are the people you and Preston are always having to save,” Shaun said, adamant now. “I’m not going to be one of those people. Even if I become a great scientist who helps everyone in the world, I don’t have to be helpless.”

Atticus was the one who looked helpless then, staring exasperatedly at his son and then to MacCready, face drawn with exhaustion.

“What do you think?” He said.

“You’re not gonna like my answer,” MacCready said.

“So, you think it’s fine? That it’s normal for a kid to be killing people?”

“I don’t think it’s fine or normal, but I think it’s unrealistic to pretend there’s never going to be a moment where Shaun needs to defend himself. The world’s a messed-up place. We know that better than most people.”

“I’m not going to bow down to the flaws of this world and make my son a killer.”

He was on the verge of storming off again; it was obvious in the way he was twisting away from them, feet pointing away like he was just about to start marching down the street. But there was nowhere to go. He couldn’t go and hide in the house or leave them at camp while he explored he land around them alone. If Atticus left, they would have to follow him. It left them all at a stand-off, all too stubborn to change their minds.

“If the world’s so bad, why do you even care about it?” Shaun said. He was pouting, a little bit, eyebrows furrowed in a way that looked so much like his father that it was breath-taking.

“Because we can make it better. You’re going to help make it better,” Atticus said. “I have a lot of making up to do. But you, and me, and your Dad, we’re going to make a difference.”

He held out a hand for Shaun to take. MacCready knew this argument would not end; as Shaun got older, more experienced, more rebellious, it would only come back again and again. How old would he be before he killed a man for the first time? The idea of his son backed against a wall, a rifle gripped in his small hands made MacCready’s chest clench in heartache. He didn’t want to ever let it come to that point, couldn’t imagine letting that happen unless he somehow failed catastrophically.

But he’d failed people before.

Shaun took Atticus’ hand, his whole hand fitting neatly inside Atticus’ palm. He reached out then to take MacCready’s hand in his other, all three of them attached like the links of a chain.

 

* * *

 

They were close enough to the Capital to see bits of it on the skyline; twisted remains of buildings that looked burned black against the grey-green sky. Closer and closer they drew, and the sicker the land became. No wonder the Brotherhood had left; the Capital looked like it was slowly dying. Of course, it was half their goddamn fault in the first place. They’d made this place so much worse before they’d given up on it in favour of attacking the Commonwealth, and they’d have ruined the Commonwealth too if the Railroad hadn’t stopped them. Fuck, MacCready hated them.

Shaun seemed afraid of the Capital. He’d grown quiet the last few days, and MacCready had caught him watching the encroaching horizon with worried, dark eyes, hiding behind the legs of whoever was close enough to be his shield. MacCready himself had started having nightmares; visions of his old home underground appearing in his mind like a dark shadow of where he’d grown up, a place where the darkness loomed ever taller and the things moving beyond the locked gate were hungrier than ever.

They were all tired of travelling, and they had the journey home yet still. Atticus was as solemnly quiet as ever, but his smile wasn’t as ready, and he joked less, left lingering silences still longer. MacCready himself was tired, his bones aching from weeks of sleeping on the ground, eyes itching from a lack of sleep and the polluted sky. There was a fire somewhere in the Capital that never stopped burning, smoke always floating through the air, grit carried with it.

A day, maybe two, out from the Capital, guards stopped them. Three people in matching body armour, all armed with rifles, stood in the main road into the Capital behind a woven barbed wire fence. Two of the three were ghouls.

If they’d cared to bother traversing the wilderness, it would have been possible to avoid the checkpoint, but as it was they stood in front of the guards at their mercy. All of the guards bore a logo on their breastplate, roughly over their heart; a skull, the eye sockets drawn to resemble twin letter Ps. A flag with the same logo was fluttering from the wall of a building a few metres past the checkpoint, the skull painted white on black, like a pirate’s.

“You traders?” The woman at the forefront of the guards asked, her fingers tight around her gun. Shaun was standing behind MacCready, gripping at his coat with one hand and the other on Dogmeat’s fur.

“No, we’re just passing through,” Atticus said.

The guards looked him over with some scepticism, eyes cautious behind the dark lenses of their goggles. Atticus was carrying a huge laser gun at his hip, and a pack on his back that could have easily fitted Shaun inside. He didn’t look like a rogue traveller, especially not when he was flanked by another gunman and a dog that was wearing thick leather armour of his own.

“Who are you people, anyway?” MacCready said, although he already had a growing suspicion in the back of his mind. “Are you raiders?”

“We’re not raiders,” the woman snapped. “We’re militia. Project Purity.”

His suspicions were right. He leaned his head towards Atticus, talking in a low voice only they could hear.

“That’s Pilgrim’s crew isn’t it?” He hissed.

“I guess we couldn’t avoid running into him,” Atticus said quietly. “We might as well say hello.”

MacCready held back on groaning out loud, pulling a face of distaste that went ignored.

“You work for Pilgrim,” Atticus said to the Project Purity guards.

“That’s the chief,” one of the guards said, looking a little uncomfortable about hearing his boss’ name from the mouth of a stranger.

“Tell him we’re here. We’re old friends,” Atticus said.

“You know the Lone Wanderer?” The first guard said, her voice heavy with disbelief.

“Oh, we go _way_ back,” MacCready said. He hated Pilgrim’s stupid titles. What else had he been called? The Wasteland Destroyer? The Vault Boogeyman? The Gray Stranger? It all just sounded like shit designed to stoke your ego.

“Tell him Atticus De Rege is here,” Atticus said.

The three guards conferred, but one split away to make a call over the radio, glancing back over her shoulder every now and again, like she was scared Atticus and MacCready were going to suddenly spring an attack on her two allies while her back was turned.

It took twenty minutes, but two figures came out from behind the corner of a building, walking down the dirty road towards them. One tall and thin and wearing a cowboy hat and duster, the other shorter, broader, wearing thick plates of armour over his leathers. Teddy Tallahassee and Ezra-Kane Pilgrim.

Tallahassee waved an arm in the air like he was greeting old friends, his face wearing a broad smile. Ezra-Kane’s face was hidden behind a huge metal helmet that MacCready recognised as belong to the Enclave. Most of Pilgrim’s armour was scavenged from sets of power armor; he wore it the way some people wore trophies. He raised an arm too, but it was to point accusingly at Atticus, jabbing at the air between them forcefully.

“Blues better not be with you,” Pilgrim said. “I told him what would happen if I saw him.”

“You think I’d bring him within a mile of you after what happened last time?” Atticus said. “He’s gone back to the Mojave, you’ll be happy to hear.”

“The hypocrite actually went back home? I thought it’d never happen,” Pilgrim said. He crossed his arms. He talked in short statements that were spoken like orders. His guards had stepped back to let him take the front, all of them watching him eagerly, like they were hungry for attention.

“He’s not a hypocrite,” MacCready said.

“Oh, you brought the Mayor with you,” Pilgrim said, his tone one of a man who considered himself incredible long-suffering. “How good to see you, RJ.”

“Charmed, Ezra.” The poison in MacCready’s voice was strong enough to kill rats.

“Ezra-Kane.”

“Whatever.”

Tallahassee rolled his eyes. As ever, he was unperturbed by Ezra-Kane’s coldness, his fiancé’s attitude always the inverse of his own. He gave MacCready a look that was filled with genuine warmth, skin around his black eyes crinkled with laughter lines.

“What brings you to home sweet home?” He said. His southern accent persisted despite the fact he’d confided that he hadn’t been in the south for near on a hundred years. The ghoul clung to his old ways with something less like stubbornness and more like a disbelief that change was possible.

“Family,” MacCready said.

Ezra-Kane cocked his head to the side. He’d noticed Shaun peeping out from behind MacCready and his shoulders relaxed a touch, the stiffness of his body giving way. Even his voice softened when he spoke next, the initial mistrust melting away.

“You three come with us,” he said. “Let’s talk inside.”

 

* * *

 

‘Inside’ was an old building about twenty minutes into the Capital; the Project Purity flag hung over the door, and the inside had been converted into a camp for the militia group. Soldiers, many ghouls or half-ghouls, sat and walked around the building, either attending to their duties or enjoying some time off. All of them showed Pilgrim and Tallahassee some respect as they passed, a nod of the head or a mock salute.

MacCready hadn’t seen Pilgrim surrounded by his own people before; when they’d first met, eleven or so years back, he’d just been a scared kid in a ragged vault suit, almost out of his mind from loneliness and paranoia. He’d stayed in Little Lamplight for the better part of a week, following the children who lived there around in a way that made him seem almost desperate for attention. He’d walked and talked like someone who was barely in touch with his own reality, his companions stone-faced, angry men who treated him with a lack of care that MacCready now recognised as thoughtless in the extreme. That Ezra-Kane had seemed fragile, brittle like the glass surrounding a Molotov cocktail. The man who had reappeared in the Commonwealth ten years later, flanked by soldiers loyal only to him, had been different; strong, tempered, no longer on the verge of shattering from the force of what was broiling inside of him. Now, later on, he felt more developed, more shaped. Like his years of experience had slowly and steadily moulded him from that scared child to a man who going to ensure he was a pillar.

A pillar of what, who could say. Ezra-Kane played his cards close to his chest. Only Tallahassee could know for certain what he was thinking.

Pilgrim took them to what was presumably his quarters, let the three of them into a room that contained a table, a few sofas, and at least seven dogs. Dogmeat immediately rushed over to greet them all, tail wagging furiously as he tried to befriend them all. Shaun looked baffled by the swarm of dogs suddenly surrounding him, all of them sniffing curiously at his clothes and belongings, all of them eagerly accepting pets and attention. MacCready scratched a huge mangy dog that was snuffling at his shoes behind the ear, the old thing lazily wagging its tail as he did.

Atticus took a grateful seat on one of the chairs, sinking back into the plush with a deep sigh. Tallahassee flopped down on one of the sofas, putting his feet up on the table and leaned his head back. He nudged Ezra-Kane on the ass with the toe of his boot, grinning playfully. Ezra-Kane swatted his hand away, turning around to glare at him. He’d removed the helmet, and MacCready was almost annoyed to see that he was still one of the most strikingly handsome men you could care to imagine, even with the enormous ragged radiation burn that dominated the right-hand side of his face.

Ezra-Kane kept shooting glances at Shaun, quick little jerks of the head that would be almost imperceptible if you weren’t watching him, always with a sadness to his face that hurt in a way MacCready didn’t care to think through. If he had to describe it in a word, he might have called it jealousy.

“You’re from here, aren’t you?” Tallahassee asked MacCready.

“Yeah. Little Lamplight.”

“The kid town?” Tallahassee blew a low whistle. “I’ve heard about that. That’s some wild shit, that. Bunch of little kiddies running around, no one cleaning up after them. I never saw it, but I bet you anything it was covered in more snot and spit than just about any other place on God’s grey Earth.”

“Is it still around?” The past-tense was worrying.

“No,” Ezra-Kane said. “The Brotherhood saw to that.”

Something hot and angry coiled in MacCready’s belly. He thought about the kids that Tuesday Blues had led out of the Prydwen, guided with a care that they all seemed uncomprehending of, all waiting to be given orders and instructions that Blues was incapable of summoning from inside himself when he looked at the face of a child.

“That him?” Ezra-Kane said, indicating Shaun. “That the boy you were looking for?”

“Yes,” Atticus said. “That’s my son.”

Shaun looked up when he was mentioned, kneeling on the ground to better play with Ezra-Kane’s small army of dogs. He looked slightly more comfortable buried in the mass of friendly fur, and smiled at his parents absently, not sure why he was being discussed.

“Funny lookin’ kid,” Tallahassee said.

Shaun looked surprised by this, but brightened when Tallahassee pulled a face, both of them sticking their tongues out at each other.

“Takes after his dad,” MacCready said. Atticus gave him a sideways look, smirking a little.

“What are you doing in the Capital?” Ezra-Kane said. “I know you didn’t come for my sake. Is it the synths? If they want work, Project Purity is hiring.”

“As soon as I get back I’m telling the Railroad to avoid this place like hell,” Atticus said, in a way that made it hard to tell if he was joking or not. “No. It’s family.”

“I have a son,” MacCready said. “He lives with friends on a smallholding I own. I want to get him and take him back to the Commonwealth with us.”

This took Ezra-Kane and Tallahassee by surprise both. They glanced at each other, Tallahassee raising his brows high.

“Where is it?” Tallahassee said, still looking Ezra-Kane in the eye.

“West. You know Shalebridge? Not far from there,” MacCready said.

“Shithole,” Ezra-Kane said.

“Don’t swear in front of my son,” MacCready said.

They locked eyes then, the tension in the air palpable enough for even the dogs to notice it, several of them pricking up their ears and staring dolefully at their master. Atticus moved a little, just draping his arm across the back of the chair, casual but enough to be noticed.

“We’ll help you get there safely,” Ezra-Kane said. “It’s rough out there. We’ll watch your backs.”

MacCready almost wanted to tell him to get fucked. Who the fuck did this guy think he was? MacCready had seen Ezra-Kane age nineteen and begging to be let into _his_ town, trembling with adolescent fury, standing shivering in the caves that _he_ ran. But it wasn’t the same anymore. This man, this guy was in charge, and it was of a whole lot more than a handful of children. He was powerful.

“Thank you,” was what he said instead.

 

* * *

 

“What happened to this place?” Shaun said.

“The war?” Tallahassee ventured.

“No, I mean, why is the Capital so much worse than home? It’s so ugly here.”

“Ah, you’re just spoiled on clean water and plants that can grow.”

Shaun huffed. “I don’t know how people live out here.”

“They don’t, mostly,” Ezra-Kane said. “Lot of people die. It’s hard.”

“Why?”

“Water’s sick. Lot of bad people. You’re lucky your dad fixed the Commonwealth up. You’re going to have a better childhood than I did.”

“How did you grow up?”

“I grew up in a vault,” Ezra-Kane said.

“Like Dad?” Shaun said, curiously.

“No. My vault had people living in it for hundreds of years, not sleeping. I lived there until I was nearly a grown-up. Then I came out here.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“What harm will one more do?”  

“Did your dad… Let you have a gun?” Shaun’s question was furtive, checking delicately to make sure that Atticus wasn’t listening in. They were walking at the back of the group, idling along after everyone else. Only MacCready was really watching the two of them, glancing over his shoulder frequently, unable to let himself relax fully with Ezra-Kane at his back.

“He gave me a BB gun when I was ten. I used to kill radroaches. And shoot at the other kids, sometimes.” Ezra-Kane talked to Shaun with a patience that was nothing like the usual snipped tone he had with everyone else.

“I don’t think you should shoot at your friends.”

“Probably not. That’s why they weren’t my friends, I think.”

“Did you get in trouble?”

“Not much. My Dad didn’t pay attention like your fathers do.”

“Did you have a Mom?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“You’re a bad influence,” Atticus interrupted suddenly, letting them know he’d heard every word. It sounded like a joke, but the tension in his jaw made it once again unclear. Ezra-Kane said nothing.

All of them – Atticus, Tallahassee, MacCready, Shaun, Ezra-Kane and six assorted dogs, including Dogmeat – were walking through the tunnels deep underneath the Wasteland, along trainlines that would have once been flooded with feral ghouls, before Project Purity sorted that out. If Project Purity had made sure of anything, it was a lot easier to move through the underground now. They were cleaning up the Capitol, in their own way. MacCready didn’t want to think about it. In a kind of blind denial that he didn’t like to see in himself, he accepted that there was nothing he could do. What Project Purity did was none of his business, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be the guy to try and stop them.

The tunnels were exactly as MacCready remembered them; the rest of the Capital may have been getting worse, but the underground never changed. Huge hollow station buildings with echoing ceilings where their footsteps rebounded back at them and made it sound as if there was a small army hiding in the shadows. Long, dark expanses where the lights didn’t work, and Ezra-Kane and Atticus had to hold their pip-boy lights high over their heads to guide the way through the damp, stinking blackness. Atticus stumbled in the darkness, rooting himself with a trusting hand on MacCready’s shoulder, eyes too weak for the dim light. They slid through doorways linking tunnels to other tunnels, trying to traverse mountains of waste that blocked the way, working around cave-ins and places where the floor just dropped out from under them, revealing a hole that led down to a deeper, darker place.

People lived in the tunnels, more than ever before, monopolising on the space now the ghouls and supermutants had been cleared out. They passed several camps, people huddled around fires made in old oil drums and garbage cans, trying to stoke warmth in the ever expanse of cold. Many of them begged for water or for a few spare caps, and Teddy Tallahassee and Ezra-Kane gave freely, passing bottle and caps out and speaking of Project Purity in low voices that made some people cringe in cautious fear. They were always recruiting, from people who looked like they needed an out, who needed some help. With everyone they spoke to, their story spread a little further. We are Project Purity, we are powerful, we are _here_.

“I grew up before the war,” Tallahassee said to Shaun, conversationally. He spoke freely and unabashedly, comfortable with everyone around him. It was easy to like Tallahassee, the casualness of his tone that almost made you believe you were friends already. It was harder to believe he was in charge of an army; he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who took responsibility for much more than his own ass. “I lived in a big city in Texas. Real bad place it was, too. I didn’t learn to shoot until I was a grown-up, after the bombs dropped. I had plenty of time to practice, though. I’ve been around a while now.”

“Dad’s from before the war,” Shaun said. “What was it like then?”

“Bad. The worst. I sure hated it,” Tallahassee said. “Anyone says otherwise got somethin’ in their eye, you ask me. Which you did.”

“When did you learn to shoot?”

“Well, things got real bad after the war, a man had to learn to look after himself. You think things were bad before, or bad now? Gee, it got real fuc- uh, real terrible when half the world was dead, and half was in vaults, and there was just us in the middle left running around up top. You did not want to get caught out in those days, cus no one would be watching out if you did. No one knew what in the damn hell they were supposed to be doing! No one was in charge. Shit, that’s why we need people like your Pa and E-K. Two hundred damn years later, and we’re still figurin’ all this stuff out.”

Jesus, yeah, that was the other thing about Tallahassee. He loved to fucking talk.

“Anyway, my point is,” he said, taking a moment to relight his cigarette. “Is that maybe I didn’t start young, but I’m the best damn sharpshooter you’ll ever meet. It ain’t when you start, it’s how much time you’re gonna put into it, you see?”

“You’re not the best,” Shaun said. He pointed to MacCready. “Dad is.”

“Like hell!” There was a wild glint in Tallahassee’s eye now, like an idea had wriggled into his head and exploded into something uncontrollable.

“He’s right,” MacCready said, not sure how much he should be feeding into this.

“Waste of bullets,” Ezra-Kane muttered.

“No, no, no,” Tallahassee said, slinging an arm around Ezra-Kane’s shoulders. “This is a matter of honour, baby, I got my name on the line. I’m not about to let some kid barely up to my knee come along and tell me I’m _not_ the greatest gunslinger in the West.”

“This is the east coast.”

“Or in the east! Sheesh, you even wanna get married to the second-best shot in the east or west? You want to have your name tied to a shame like that? Don’t tell me you want second-best, E-K, I know you don’t. I know you like I know the back of my hand, and the back of my hand says you’re a man who likes things the best of the best. And that’s _why_ you picked me out, baby, I know it, because you’re a man of discerning taste.”

“Clearly not.”

“ _Yes,_ you are, and you knew I was the best shot, and now we need to prove it. It’s a matter of honour. You know how much this matters to me, and I know how much this matters to you, so let’s just cut this short and have a goddamn shooting contest.”

“Pilgrim,” Atticus said, stepping through Tallahassee’s torrent of words.

“Yeah?”

“You ever get much sleep with him around?”

It was hard to tell with the Enclave helmet on, but it sure sounded like Ezra-Kane laughed.

When they got outside, Tallahassee got his shooting contest. MacCready and Tallahassee both got their sniper rifles out, took aim at a sheet of metal hanging from the side of a building that it had once been cladding. It must have been five hundred metres away from them, hanging onto the building through nothing more than a couple of narrow steel cables. Between the two of them, they shot all the cables out and sent the metal sheet tumbling to the ground, and then they argued for the next fifteen minutes about which one had really hit it.

 

* * *

 

They camped out at night in the ground floor of what would have once been a building, and was now just the suggestion of one, concrete walls jutting out of the earth and raising to hold up nothing, metal pipes that would have framed the walls now rusting to almost dust, a skeleton of what it had once been. They had run into some trouble earlier in the day from a group of slavers passing by, who Ezra-Kane had insisted on hunting down with the kind of burning vengeance that MacCready decided he never wanted to be on the receiving end of, however much he disliked the man.

At night, the Capital was pitch black, almost as dark as the underground was. A hollow wind blew through the holes in their weak building shield, left MacCready shivering even when he was pressed up against the warmth of Atticus’ body. They had a small fire going, but it mostly just cast huge shadows over the walls, their figures waving and dancing in the dark, distorted visions of themselves.

MacCready dreamed of coming back to a farm where people lay dead on the ground, poison water dripping from their mouths. He dreamed of an empty cot that filled him with fear, and cold beds with dark stains blossoming over the pillows. He dreamed of dark dirt holding onto small skeletons, deep below the ground, where no amount of frantic digging could reach them, even when he scrabbled against the earth until his nails came back ragged and bloodied.

He woke up before sunrise, when the fire was just embers and Atticus was snoring in his ear. His eyes were bleary as he blinked away sleep, but when they adjusted he could make out the shape of Ezra-Kane kneeling by one of the dogs, scratching it behind the ear while he smoked a cigarette, the smoke dissipating instantly in the already foul air. MacCready carefully unwound himself from Atticus’ arms and eased across the floor towards him, making sure not to step on any of the hounds lying slumbering on the ground.

Ezra-Kane looked up at him as he approached, scratching lazily at the burn scar. It looked like it was getting worse, even though it was something like ten, eleven years old now. The skin was peeling away from his face and leaving something else behind, something tougher, something worn hard with burns and radiation. His eyes were changing, too. He’d lose his hair, eventually. He was changing with the times, and MacCready almost questioned if he was doing it on purpose, making himself someone who could live potentially forever, an evolved specimen of the new era. It was hard to know with Ezra-Kane. He was too good at making accidents look deliberate.

“Bum a smoke?” MacCready said. Obligingly, Ezra-Kane handed him one.

The sun was threatening to rise, light over the horizon watery, diffused amongst the heavy clouds. By the end of tomorrow, they’d be at MacCready’s homestead. He’d be able to hold his son in his arms again, for the first time in… No, it hurt too bad to think about. It didn’t matter anymore. The space between him and his boy was closing, and that was what counted. He tried to calm the fear tumbling through his body with the cigarette and the memory of Atticus’ comforting hand in the darkness.

“Your kids are lucky,” Ezra-Kane said. “So many people love them.”

The earnestness of the statement caught MacCready off-guard. “Thanks,” he said, unable to think of anything snappier to say.

“You’re doing the right thing, getting him out of here.”

“What _happened_ to this place? It just… It wasn’t good when I crawled out of the dirt, but somehow… It’s not getting better.”

“You ever hear about Project Purity? Not mine, the other one. Old one.”

“On the radio, yeah. Fuck, what happened to that? Three Dog? I never hear him anymore.”

“The old Project Purity wanted to purify all the water. But the Enclave altered it. Made it kill anyone infected with radiation. Wiped out half the state.”

“Jesus Christ. I knew the water was poison, but I didn’t know…”

Ezra-Kane was watching something distant, and when MacCready looked, he could just make out the shine of light on water. He thought about the purifiers the Minutemen and Atticus had rigged up across the Commonwealth, the amount of time and effort they poured into building working infrastructure, the endless nights travelling around teaching people how to do basic repairs. MacCready could probably put one together with his eyes closed now, just from helping everyone else put them together. It seemed nonsensical that people died in droves a few thousand miles away just because no one knew how to put them together – or maybe the water here was just too bad, maybe it needed special treatment that couldn’t be easily solved. And the one chance they’d had had been sabotaged.

“I can’t believe people would do that,” MacCready said. “Imagine what this place would be like if there was clean water. The difference that would make.”

“I’d rather not waste time on hypotheticals,” Ezra-Kane said. “I do what I can.”

“Which is?”

“Kill the slavers. Make work. Try to rebuild. It’s not as easy when you don’t have people willing to do the heavy lifting for you already.”

“Atticus worked hard to build the Minutemen.”

“They were still there, already. It’s just me and Teddy out here. We had to get out the Brotherhood, and the raiders. It never ends.”

“Why bother then?”

“It’s my home. I never had a house, loving family. I have this.” He spread his arms wide to show off the majesty of the wasteland at its finest. Somewhere on the horizon a cloud broke, rain falling down on some unfortunates. “Maybe it’s what I deserve. But I’m going to make it something better.”

MacCready kind of had to believe him. Atticus was slow, persistent, would work with a mass of people to get them to unite in a single cause to make a world that wasn’t so hard to wake up to every single day. Ezra-Kane was persistent too, but he wasn’t going to wait for people to fall in line with him. He was going to craft something he wanted to see out of what he was given. There was no ready acceptance of ‘this is what the world is now’; he would make the world what he wanted it to be or die trying. That was simply how he was.

“It won’t be long until you see your kid,” Ezra-Kane said, changing the subject now the old one bored him.

“I know. I can’t believe it.”

“Why’d you bring the kid all the way out here?”

“He wanted to come.”

“You’re too soft on him.”

“Good. I want to be soft with him. It’s a hard, scary world. I don’t have to be part of that, for him.”

“He’s a robot, right?” Ezra-Kane said. “Does he know?”

“No.”

“You gonna tell him?”

“No.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Atticus…” MacCready didn’t know why he was telling Ezra-Kane this, but it was easy, somehow, just to admit the truth for once. No one else wanted to hear it. “It’s like he’s forgotten where Shaun came from.”

“Hm.” Ezra-Kane inhaled thoughtfully. “That’s a timebomb. And he’s going to find out. The boy. He’ll be angry you didn’t tell him.”

“He won’t find out. Not for a long time, anyway.”

“Took me nineteen years to find out the truth. Would have been a lot less angry if I was ten.”

“That’s a hypothetical.”

“Take my advice or don’t, mayor-for-life. It’s on you.”

“Yes,” MacCready said. “It is.” He sounded more confident than he felt.

 

* * *

 

It rained on them as they walked, fat wet drops that burned to the touch. They took shelter underground, waiting in the open doorway of a blocked-up subway tunnel, watching the rain flood the cracks in the road with water. Atticus and Tallahassee talked in low tones about the world before the bombs dropped, a place that and increasingly few number of people would ever be able to remember. Shaun was mesmerised by the conversation, by the idea of a world he’d never seen before. MacCready found it hard not to listen in too, imagining a world that had died hundreds of years before he’d even been an idea.

“The noise is what gets me, when I look back, y’know? I always say to myself, shoot, it couldn’t have really been that loud, could it? All those people in all those buildings, all those cars on all those roads…” Tallahassee spoke in winding ideas, following his own loose and disorganised trains of thought. “It’s hard to believe the world could have been so loud. Nowadays, you stand in the most populated town you find, you barely hear more than a couple of conversations. Lived in apartments louder than that, before.”

“It’s only been… A year, for me,” Atticus said, “but it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been like this forever. I can’t imagine what it’s like looking back for you.”

“I can’t believe it hasn’t been like this, and I’m glad it’s like this. A man can just live now, can’t he? You remember how it was? You able to live? I was twenty-one when the bombs dropped, didn’t breathe a day in my life before then. Felt like I’d been suffocating that whole time.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t feel very free to breathe myself, before, but I don’t know if it’s freedom we have now. I think there’s a kind of… Prison in having nothing. It’s all well and good if you know how to build, but you can’t… Expect that from everyone.”

“You lost me. There’s no goddamn responsibility here except what you want. No consequences. If you don’t want to build what you need, just take it. Who’s going to stop you? What’s going to stop you?” Tallahassee smiled when he spoke, a light glimmering behind his dark eyes.

“I don’t know if it’s freedom when the weak are always punished because the strong won’t take responsibility.”

“That was true before.”

“Yeah and look where that got us.”

The rain stopped, and they continued to walk, over ground now soaked in mud and water. It wouldn’t be too much longer before they got there. Every part of MacCready’s body felt like it was enveloped in something that burned, every hair on his arm standing on end. He mashed his hand into Atticus’ and tried to concentrate on something other than the way he felt like he was sweating fire. It took Atticus no time to notice something was wrong, and he deliberately slowed their pace, letting the others take the lead and leaving the two of them to fall behind. Ahead of them, Shaun sprinted in circles around Tallahassee, talking nineteen to the dozen about laser beam refraction, oblivious to his parents’ slight distance.

“Are you ok?” Atticus said softly, leaning over to press his face into the crook of MacCready’s neck.

“Little worried, if I’m being honest,” MacCready said. He tried to keep his voice light, but there was a shaking note to it that made his fear painfully honest.

Atticus pulled him close, winding his arms tightly around his shoulders. He nodded his head to Shaun, who was still talking excitedly at the others, encouraged along by their slight nods even though MacCready was sure they didn’t understand a word.

“He’s doing okay, isn’t he?” Atticus said, pride in his voice evident.

“Yeah,” MacCready said. Ezra-Kane’s words of warning rose in the back of his mind, but he brushed them away. He didn’t know if it was stubbornness or ignorance, or just belief in his son, but he wasn’t going to let the warning bother him. He couldn’t. “He’s doing amazing.”

“We did that. We’re raising him. And we’ll raise Duncan too. Things are going to be ok, Mr Mayor. It’s going to be the four of us, walking the Earth till the day we die. Nothing is going to split us up again.”

MacCready had told Lucy once, that nothing would get between them. He certainly never thought that he’d end up remarrying just a few short years later. It had seemed impossible back them, when he’d promised her forever, that he would have to leave her behind. It seemed just as impossible now to imagine anyone ever taking Atticus down; even more so, in fact. But it was in the certainty that fear and doubt rose; the idea that his love and his desperation to be happy were drowning out a voice of ‘common sense’ that told him to be afraid, to stay on his toes about losing all this again, forever.

“Hey,” Atticus said. “I know you’re scared. Me too.”

“Yeah?” MacCready said.

“Yeah, of course. I worry all the time. Christ, what if he slips right now and breaks his ankle, and we have to spend a month out here waiting for him to recover? Life is full of terrifying maybes. But we’re going to get through this. We’re going to be better.”

Atticus planted a firm kiss on his cheek and another on his lips for good measure.

“Alright, alright,” MacCready said, smiling. “You’re right.”

“I always am,” Atticus said. “Hey Shaun! Look at how high I can lift your Dad!”

MacCready didn’t have time to speak before Atticus was sweeping him off his feet and lifting him up into the air like a football while Shaun yelled encouragement. Tallahassee howled with laughter, the dogs barking in unison. They were the loudest party moving through the wastes that day by a million miles, the sound of their celebration rolling over the dead, empty hills. MacCready got his own back when Atticus’ bad knee gave out and the two of them tumbled to the ground in a heap of limbs and their over-excited, eager to join son forcing himself into the impromptu wrestling match.

 

* * *

 

The smallholding looked more or less the same as it had when MacCready had left it. A tiny shack of a house on a parcel of land half the size of the house they had in Sanctuary. A small patch of corn was growing, almost ready to be picked, stalks trembling in the lazy wind. There was some kind of creeping plant growing across the pitiful grass, bearing berries of a strange blood-red. The house itself looked to be in better repair than MacCready had left it; someone more willing than he had been to do hard labour had patched it up. It sounded insane to him now that there had been a time when he wasn’t willing to get down and do his part in hammering nails into boards. He’d built his own goddamn house now from scratch.

Ezra-Kane and Tallahassee stopped at the bottom of the hill, took a seat and waited while MacCready and Atticus walked hand-in-hand with Shaun up to the little house. Far away, an Enclave eyebot drifted, spitting out nothing but staticky warbling. Other than that, there was silence, nothing but the crunch of their worn boots on the dirt track, following the old imprints of footsteps in the mud.

Penny was out front, working away digging at the ground with a trowel, making space in the earth for whatever she was going to plant next. She looked up when she heard them approaching, saw MacCready, and dropped her trowel in shock, her hand flying to her mouth.

“Robert?” She said, her voice carrying high through the silent air.

“Hey, Penny,” MacCready said. “Guess I should have wrote, first, huh?”

She stood up, not bothering to brush the dirt off her pants as she came to give MacCready a welcoming hug. She was somewhere between surprised and delighted, happy to see him but clearly unsure of what was happening and why he was here. She hadn’t even looked at Atticus or Shaun yet, too taken up by the surprise appearance of her old friend.

“You look so tired,” she said. “You walked all the way here?”

“Yeah. Took two weeks, but we made it.”

“No wonder you’re so exhausted. What are you doing here? We had no idea you were coming.”

“Well…” MacCready gestured to Atticus, who was wearing a small, gentle smile and trying to hide the nervousness in his eyes. “Penny, this is Atticus De Rege. Few months back, we uh, we got married.”

“Holy shit. Robert Joseph MacCready, you never do stop surprising, do you?” Penny said, turning to give Atticus a proper once-over. “You have to be one of the biggest guys I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks,” Atticus said. “Helps keep these two safe.”

“Who’s _this?_ ” Penny said, looking at Shaun, cooing with a delight that made Atticus’ face shine with pride.

“This is Shaun. Atticus’ son,” MacCready said.

“Our son,” Atticus said.

Realisation hit Penny like a bolt, the confusion wiped off her face and leaving behind an understanding that was tinged with obvious sadness. She didn’t want to let Duncan go.

“We have a good place back in the Commonwealth,” MacCready said. “God, Penny, you should see it. It’s so much better than here. You thought Rivet City was something, you have to see Diamond City…” His voice trailed off. “You understand.”

“Of course I do,” Penny said. “You wanna see him?”

“Yes. God, yes, of course.”

Penny turned, calling over her shoulder to the house.

“Duncan! Come out here, sweetie!”

“What is it?” A voice said, faint and far away. MacCready squeezed Atticus’ hand hard, his pulse racing.

“There’s someone here who really wants to see you.”

Duncan burst out of the house, shaking with hope and desire that exploded on his face in a huge smile, tears rolling down his cheeks as soon as he saw who was waiting for him. MacCready dropped to one knee, holding his arms wide and his son – his son! – came barrelling towards him, leaping into his outstretched arms and balling plump baby fists in the back of his coat, clutching at him so tightly that he almost couldn’t breathe, but definitely didn’t care. He hugged Duncan back, as hard as he dared, holding him to his chest and failing not to cry.

“It’s you! It’s you, it’s you, it’s you!” Duncan said, babbling with excitement.

“It’s me,” MacCready said, voice cracking with emotion. “I missed you so much.”

“Missed you too,” Duncan said. He pulled back to look at MacCready’s face, blue eyes filled with wonder that life could be so good; that sometimes your father did finally come home to you, that you really could be well and strong enough to run into his arms.

MacCready lifted Duncan off the ground, holding him in the crook of his arm as if he weighed nothing more than a bag of flour. He’d put on weight with age and newfound health, but that didn’t matter. MacCready would still want to pick him up and cradle him when he was forty, never mind four.

Duncan was looking at Atticus with apprehension, not sure who this teary-eyed stranger was, or why he looked upon him with so much affection. God, MacCready had thought of nothing but seeing Duncan again for months on end, but now he was here, he could barely think of how to introduce Atticus. It was safe to say that he’d never anticipated this when he’d left, that he’d be coming back to his son only to leave again so quickly. Leaving _with_ his son.

“Hi, Duncan,” Atticus said. “I’m Atticus. I’m really excited to meet you.”

“Do you know my Dad?”

“I’m married to your Dad.”

Duncan processed this, warm little cheek pressed into MacCready’s, teeth worrying at his bottom lip as he thought.

“Does that mean you’re my Dad?” Duncan said.

“If you want me to be,” Atticus said.

Duncan thought about it. “Maybe.”

“You don’t have to decide right now,” MacCready said. “There’s all the time in the world to get to know each other.”

 

* * *

 

Penny and her wife talked with MacCready and Atticus around the low, hand-carved table in their small two-room house. Talked plans, talked about the future, while Duncan sat stubbornly on MacCready’s knee, refusing to leave his father’s side as he cross-talked over the adult conversation with Shaun. The children were still caught up in the novelty of each other’s existence, never before having experienced the realities of siblinghood.

“I’m not going to say I’m happy to let him go, but he’s your son, Robbie. It’s up to you.”

“You should come too, Penny. It’s so much better out there.”

“I can understand that you want to make a new life. But you’re going to have to accept you’re leaving people behind.”

They did leave, early the next day, after spending an easy day resting at the house. Penny was uneasy about Ezra-Kane and Tallahassee’s distant presence, the occasional howl of the dogs and the rise of their campfire smoke. MacCready carried Duncan on his hip for nearly the entire day, until the boy demanded to be put down, proclaiming that he was not a baby. As soon as he was on the floor he ran to play with Shaun, the two running games of tag around the small space of the house and its grounds, but he very rarely went ten minutes without returning to his father’s side. He asked frequently for reassurance and commentary on every toy he owned, every game he and Shaun played. The adults were all too ready, too happy, to fulfil his desire for attention.

But they did leave, the party grown from five to six, Duncan’s meagre belongings stowed in one of Dogmeat’s saddlebags. The plan was they would head to Project Purity headquarters, take the next wagon out of the Capital, which Ezra-Kane assured them was heading for a city in Pennsylvania and would save them a huge amount of time. MacCready didn’t think Duncan could walk the whole way, not when he was so young and so unused to travel.

It was MacCready who delayed them, demanded a diversion that Ezra-Kane had argued bitterly against. Ezra-Kane’s aversion to taking their party off the beaten path alerted MacCready to the sudden realisation that the Project Purity leaders were not their companions at all, were not there to protect them. They were protecting their land from Atticus’ influence. In the end, Ezra-Kane conceded, only when Tallahassee said it would do no harm. And for the last time in his life, MacCready went to Little Lamplight.

Not that there was much of Little Lamplight left to go to. The wooden door that had once closed off the entrance tunnel had been kicked in, leaving the once-hidden exposed to the world. The elements had done a number on it, debris snagged in the small entranceway and garbage dragged down the sides of the short tunnel. There were no lights on the long walk to where MacCready’s guard post had once sat, the cave plunged into darkness. They used to keep soft lamps on always when he was in charge; too many children afraid of the dark to risk letting the light go out.

The tunnel down to the entrance was empty, but when he reached the guard post, it had been destroyed. The lifting gate they’d worked so hard to maintain had been blasted off, the wooden frame of the post sagging over the new hole that had been ripped into it. The wood and cardboard were rotting now, MacCready’s old sniper post lying at the base of the post in a mound of wood splinters. It had been destroyed, definitely deliberately torn apart by people who had ripped through the defences of the town with all the grace of a wrecking ball through a skylight.

He was the only one who had strayed into Little Lamplight; behind him, Atticus was balancing Duncan on his hip and arguing with Ezra-Kane, their voices steadily rising louder and louder, echoing through the tunnel from where they stood, halfway between Lamplight and the entrance. MacCready felt inexplicably annoyed at them for choosing now to have their fight; he had come here because it mattered to him, to say a final goodbye.

“People are living in the tunnels under the city like _rats_. They need _homes_. If you want to make a difference to this place, you have to give people an opportunity to live independently.”

“What I’m _doing_ is clearing the Capital of scum that are trying to decimate people’s lives and give people a chance to create their own homes, instead of funnelling people into whatever land is convenient for me.”

“No, what you’re doing is keeping people dependent on Project Purity for resources while you use your workforce to make yourself rich.”

“ _Rich_? I look rich to you?”

“All traders to the Capital run through your militia. You control the supply of all goods to and from the Capital. Don’t tell me you aren’t profiting off that.”

MacCready wished they’d shut up. He tried to ignore them, pressing onwards through the gate and into the first of the many caverns that made up Little Lamplight. It had been a long seven years since he had last been there; he had felt so adult then, looking at the faces of the kids he’d lead for nearly five years, like he was holding onto all of the wisdom of the world. The burden of responsibility was lifted the second the gate had slammed shut behind him but standing in the caverns now and viewing the wreck that had once been the office building made him feel like, somehow, he had failed those kids.

Little Lamplight was like another world. He’d been mayor, the leader of a small army of children, and at the time it had felt like the most important job in the world. And in his world, it had been. He had run the town well, while he’d been there. He’d been so reluctant to leave; he’d made fun of kids before for crying when they were cast out of Little Lamplight when they aged out, but when it came his turn, he’d had nothing but fear in his heart. The caverns had been the only world he’d ever known, and the Wasteland was a distant terror filled with threats he hadn’t even been able to imagine.

Now, an adult, years later, he found it impossible to believe they’d survived so well alone. He couldn’t imagine leaving either of his kids to their own devices and expecting them to raise themselves. The fact he was a somewhat together adult now was nothing short of a fucking miracle; he knew other kids from Little Lamplight ended up much worse off when they got outside, swallowed up by the easy horrors of the Wastes. Somehow, despite it all, RJ MacCready had made it to twenty-three whole years of age and even fucking made something of a success of his life.

He wanted now to go to the great cavern, see the places where the kids used to live, sleep, play, learn. Or at least go to Spelunkers, check out the old canteen where he’d eaten every meal for the first sixteen years of his life. But when MacCready began to head down the narrow winding tunnel that led from the entrance to the main caverns of Little Lamplight, he found the path clogged up with fallen rocks. He crouched to press an eye to a gap between some of the pieces of rubble but could see nothing beyond but blackness. It would take days of hard labour to move it all, and they didn’t have the time.

When he had been sixteen, and the gate of Little Lamplight had slammed shut behind him, he had made it as far as wooden door before he started to cry. He’d been so dismayed at his own sorrow at the time, furious with himself for not being happier that he was going to get out, make it to Big Town, finally start his own life all alone. At sixteen, he’d clenched his hands into fists and willed himself to press on and leave the caverns. RJ MacCready was not going to be some fucking weak baby who cried himself to sleep over anything, let alone having to leave babytown. He was going to make it on his own.

Three years after that he’d been racing for his life out of a subway tunnel with his baby swaddled in his coat, choking with tears so painfully that he couldn’t breathe. Then, he’d really felt like he didn’t deserve to be alive, that he should have given himself up to the same pack of feral ghouls that cost him Lucy and the small shred of a life they’d managed to gather together.

There was no returning to Little Lamplight, now or ever again. It was gone, something else that would exist only in the memories of the people who had lived it. MacCready thought of Atticus and Tallahassee’s talk about the Old World, looking back on a place that just didn’t exist anymore, and never could again. He shut his eyes and thought of what it had been like when the caverns were alive with kids, the tunnels filled with more than just the sound of water tripping from stalactites, of infant voices and laughter and arguments. He tried to remember, but he found himself too distracted by the voices echoing from further back down the tunnels to think clearly.

At first, he’d been annoyed, but as he peeled away from the wall of stone he found himself suddenly grateful. Fuck this place. Fuck Little Lamplight, and being scared in the darkness, knowing no one on the outside was going to be watching his back. Fuck having to fight for every scrap. It had been miserable here, and he owed it no more respect than he ever had.

As he followed the tunnels back up and out, he heard Shaun and Duncan calling for him, high peals of ‘Dad! Daaaaaad!’ followed by Atticus’ gentle scolding, that this was important to their father and they should let him take his time. He emerged from the ruins of Little Lamplight and scooped Duncan out of Atticus’ arms, accepting a kiss from his husband on the top of his forehead.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

 

* * *

 

Project Purity HQ – which Atticus insisted on calling ‘the Pentagon’ because it made Ezra-Kane angry – was a vast, sprawling complex that MacCready distinctly remembered being the old headquarters of the east coast Brotherhood of Steel. Whether Project Purity had scavenged it after the Brotherhood had left or been the ones to drive the Brotherhood out, MacCready couldn’t say. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He was tired of Pilgrim, of the constant cloud of doubt and bitterness that followed him everywhere. He was sick of the ugly Capital, the reminders of his old home that held nothing for him anymore. He was even tired of Teddy Tallahassee’s permanent good mood and long, rambling monologues. MacCready wanted to go home.

Shaun was awed into silence by the vastness of the interior courtyard of Project Purity HQ, staring up at the huge fortified walls that made the place borderline impenetrable despite the obvious wear and tear the concrete had seen. The place was bustling with Project Purity soldiers, even more than the small encampment they had met on their way into the Capital, and none of them showed the family standing by the leaving caravan any interest at all. It reminded MacCready more of the Brotherhood of Steel camp at the Airport more than it did the Minutemen’s Castle and took comfort in the idea that telling Ezra-Kane that would probably make him furious.

“I’m going to say this once,” Ezra-Kane said to Atticus. “You can’t come back here. Ever.”

“Scared of me, Pilgrim?” Atticus said lightly.

“Sometimes I wonder if I should have killed you before I left the Commonwealth.”

“Funny. I think about the exact same thing.”

It was obvious neither of them were joking.

“You stick to your city, I’ll have mine,” Ezra-Kane said.

“Boston isn’t my city,” Atticus said. “It’s a place for the people. You wouldn’t understand that.”

“We’ll talk about what I understand when the ‘people’s city’ gets overrun by the next army that takes a fancy to it.”

“You’ll be waiting a long time, then. Call me when one of your seconds inevitably makes a power-grab and your entire militia turns on you.”

“They won’t,” Ezra-Kane said, smiling so wide that MacCready could see all his teeth. “Not after last time.”

The trader driving the caravan made an uncomfortable allusion to wanting to leave soon. MacCready finished hauling their luggage into the wagon and gave Atticus a significant look; it was beyond time for them to be leaving. He climbed onto the wagon himself and waited for his husband to find a last word good enough for him to be willing to leave on. There was a chance that the second apocalypse might come before that happened, but MacCready would just have to wait it out.

Shaun sat beside him, side-by-side with their legs dangling over the back of the wagon. He was still staring in wonder at the walls of Project Purity HQ. He’d come dangerously close to pitching a fit when he’d heard they had real, honest-to-God _labs_ inside the complex that he wasn’t going to get to see, something MacCready was very certain Tallahassee had only told him about because he thought seeing Atticus and MacCready struggle to calm down a burgeoning tantrum was funny. But now he was quiet, taking in the sights while they waited to leave.

“What do you think?” MacCready said.

“It’s pretty scary,” Shaun said.

“You don’t want to stay, then?”

“No… I don’t like how bad this place is. I don’t want the Commonwealth to ever look like this.”

“It won’t. Atticus and the Minutemen won’t let it.”

“I’ll help them,” Shaun said. “I’ll figure out a way to.”

He lapsed into a thoughtful silence after that, eyes distant as he worked through the ideas sparking in his mind.

Atticus was finally pulling himself away from the Project Purity leaders, stopping to shake Tallahassee’s hand before he climbed into the wagon beside MacCready.

“You think it’s funny we both married snipers?” He said to Ezra-Kane, leaning out of the wagon for one last exchange.

“I think it’s funny you have early stage cortical cataracts I would have treated if you didn’t fucking piss me off so much,” Ezra-Kane said.

“Guess we have different senses of humour,” Atticus said.

The wagon began to pull away, the driver giving the brahmin the go-ahead to make their way through the huge steel gate that was the sole way into HQ. Tallahassee waved as they left, laughing high and loud a joke that they’d never have the privilege of hearing. MacCready wondered if they’d ever see each other again, and felt with some great certainty that they probably, inevitably, would.

The rocking of the wagon sent Duncan into an immediate nap, lying with his head on MacCready’s knee and his thumb stuck firmly in his mouth. MacCready sat and watched the Citadel grow small behind them as the wagon pulled them further out of the Capital and closer to home. If this was the last time he ever set foot in the Capital, he didn’t feel like he’d be sorry about it. There were better things waiting for him on the horizon, and he couldn’t wait to sleep in his own goddamn bed in his own house.

The sky darkened as they rode their way home, a heavy rain falling on the canvas covering of the wagon and leaving dark stains on the dull-coloured material. Shaun stared at the patterns the rain formed, amusing himself by watching drops racing down the bowed sides of the roof. He was good at keeping himself occupied; there was a kind of quiet loneliness to him sometimes, like he was so caught up inside his own mind that he let himself drift away from the people around him. MacCready thought of what Ezra-Kane had said, about how lucky he was to have people who loved him. He hoped that the love would stop Shaun from going somewhere his fathers could not follow.

He didn’t know what was going to happen in the future. Fuck knows how Shaun would grow up. Maybe an army would sweep into the Commonwealth and they’d be fighting for their lives for the next twenty years. Maybe another apocalypse would happen. Even Mama Murphy’s predictions weren’t good enough to know. MacCready was tired; it was time for him to stop sitting in his own head and fretting, arguing with himself about what he needed or had. His sons both rested comfortably in the shade of the caravan, protected from the rain, and his husband watched the river ebb and flow as they passed it by, with eyes that were good, for now.  

“I’ve had enough travelling to last me the next ten years,” he told Atticus.

“I think we deserve some rest,” Atticus said.

**Author's Note:**

> Some quick clarifications for people who really made it the whole way through this;
> 
> People who follow my tumblr will know that when talking to Atticus I change the pronoun I use for them as many times as I can in a paragraph. And while I like them being a person whose gender is fluid and not rooted tightly to any particular set of pronouns, writing like that in a full narrative threatens to become incomprehensible. So I stuck with he/him for this story. Maybe next time I write about him I'll use something completely different, but maybe it's presumptuous to assume I'll write another fanfic any time this century. 
> 
> Also yes, Ezra-Kane Pilgrim was the one who poisoned the original Project Purity, but he and Teddy Tallahassee are the only ones who know about this. Everyone else thinks the Enclave did it alone. And yes, he was present in the Mojave for the events of Fallout New Vegas as well as in the Commonwealth for most of Fallout 4. He gets around. Teddy Tallahassee is an entirely original construct, if anyone was wondering why the name didn't sound at all familiar.
> 
> All of the stuff about the Brotherhood destroying Little Lamplight is my own headcanons. Also I know canon says Shaun can't actually grow up but you can chalk that up to Atticus' rock-solid denial and also the fact I want to ignore that piece of trivia entirely too. Whichever pleases you best. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed reading this rumination on... Themes. The story had themes. I like to think so, at least.


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